


Iron

by 35grams (caxxe)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon vampire Erwin, Consensual Blood Drinking, M/M, Religion, Vampire AU, [later], canonverse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-04-29 06:58:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5119283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caxxe/pseuds/35grams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He nearly envies the titans their feasts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

His heart leaps at a muffled rustling, but it is only a rat. The chattery piebald squeezes between the weathered pews and darts toward the crumbs near the altar. We're one of a kind, Erwin thinks. He raises the nondescript canteen to his lips.

He likes to do it here. To drink where the body was closest to whoever it was the Wallists believed to own their bodies and souls. It was never clear to what degree they were willing to anthropomorphize the walls. One day, the three were goddesses after whom the structures had been named, deities who constructed the divine walls to spare humanity in their infinite pity. On another, they were trapped within. On a third, there were no gods at all, nothing but stone.

He likes to do it here because he loathes hiding. He loathes the idea of tucking himself away into some dark corner with the windows shut and the door locked thrice over before looking over his shoulder and then maybe, if there is no sound left in the world and at least three solid states of matter between him and the nearest pair of eyes, he might unscrew the cap of the canteen.

The taste is intoxicatingly hideous.

No, he likes to do it here where holy work was done, here where stable hand and lord alike begged and thanked and swore, here in the belly of the house of Goddesses so they couldn't turn their elegant heads away from the creature their own hands molded, from the devil they forged from their idle breath.

Every few generations, a baker's dozen or so of humanity found their canines aching at a certain age, found their lust for life's ruddy rivers running deeper at the sight of every sinking neckline, at every milky thigh. The stories lovingly illuminated in goatskin parchment these hooved and horned earthbound demons, but Erwin found no bumps on his head, and all ten toes accounted for every morning, every evening.

It costs him little but a discrete supplier and an occasional toothache. It inconveniences him as severely as the occasional, distant craving for sweets, for chocolate. No one knows. No one needed to know. Loneliness is a luxury.

The altar overflows with icons. Some are an inch tall and luxuriously detailed with what must have been a single strand of a downy feather. Stained windows carry the deities' image as faithfully as the reliefs crawling out of the stone. Erwin raises his canteen and drinks to subtlety.

The craving blossoms during expeditions. The sweet, metallic aroma clings to the air like a physical thing. His veins shudder for it. His gut writhes with his desire for it, for something warm, something rushing and fighting and alive. The contents of the chilled bags that come bundled and hidden at the agreed upon location are drained from long-dead malnourished corpses from the farthest corners of the underground city. Stale. Fermenting. Chewy, lukewarm clots stick to his teeth. Charcoal to steak. Rot to pastry.

So when he gnaws at his chalky rations and makes a scene of having forgotten something so that he may return to his horse and choke them down with the frothing remains of a long-dead soul, when he makes his bed in the clammy, blood-stained folds of his much-patched sleeping bag, and when he denies his tongue the riches in the body bags piled not meters away, he nearly envies the titans their feasts.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

“Captain!”

Erwin stops his horse. The thirty-strong contingent of Survey Corps soldiers behind him slows, too.

The horseman gallops to his side. Sweat plasters his hair to his ruddy face. “Captain, thank the walls-”

“Is there an emergency?”

“Of a sort, captain. It's a...a delicate matter. If we could-”

“You understand, don't you, that this is highly unorthodox? We're leaving the walls in mere hours-”

“We have one, sir,” the man says, appearing to try to whisper and yet do so loudly enough for Erwin to hear. Erwin hushes him with a raised palm and leads their horses several meters aside. The countryside swallows them.

“Speak freely.”

“Our officiate passed last night. Our third in seven days. It was that beast, and on her Reckoning, too. She cursed him and all the others and we have no one else to offer the creature her last counsel. We cannot abandon the scriptures but another clergyman won't arrive in days, and we simply can't wait-”

“Beast?”

And when the man tells Erwin what it was he meant, the captain calls forward a junior scout to ride ahead and inform the commander that he would be delayed.

Every town has its officiate, a holy man who coordinates between the local judge and the church. One of his lesser known responsibilities, much in part because the occasion for it was so rare, is to provide counsel to the convicted prior to their execution. Executions were wasteful things. Factories need workers. Farmers need hands. But occasionally, there appears a worker no factory would open its doors to, a hand no farmer would dare employ.

Erwin instructs the soldiers to keep moving. He follows the man back to his village, but a third set of hooves follows. On any other day, Erwin might have reprimanded Levi, demanded he join the rest, but now wasn't the moment to shake this already shaken man's confidence in his imagined authority.

As they make their way into the village, Levi asks no questions. He makes no snide remarks. It's been three weeks since three new bunks became one. It's been one since he was willing to look Erwin in the eye.

They pass the town square. At its center towers a wooden stake out of a pool of dry, browning hay. Its shadow slices through the tittering crowd that mills around it with chants waiting on lips that sing lullabies to sons and daughters, and hands rolled into fists that, undone, may stroke a friend's hair or gather the morning dew off blushing petals.

Erwin descends the steps into the courthouse's underground jail. Levi insists on accompanying him, and Erwin doesn't argue. In the dungeon is a single cell, and in that cell, a young woman. Her pale skin is a record of a hundred stolen mornings. Erwin opens the cell door and she convulses for a few moments before the sound became more of the laugh it was intended to be. She picks him apart as he takes a seat on the stone bench opposite the fetal curl of her knobby limbs and Erwin lets her, lets her sneer at his wings and the part of his hair and the shine of his boots because his heart bled for this soul he knew of only minutes before, for this name his lips had never wrapped around before, the two united by nothing more than a little extra iron in their diet and so intimately that for her, he'd share his soul.

She asks Erwin with a voice like rotting gunpowder what great famine visited the minds of her captors for them to send a soldier to do a priest's work and Erwin feels more than sees Levi's eyes widening with hers as he informs her that he had once been a single verse away from joining the clergy himself.

Erwin embellishes the finer points, but the story isn't hollow. Bent double by the growing ache in his teeth and the blossoming flush of violence plucking at his fingertips, he had devoured first schoolhouse, then university libraries in his youth for an answer, any answer. He tailed physicians and clergyman and asked every conceivable question until he at last he uncovered a thread for him to pluck in an old folk tale in a battered old book in the leather-hide hands of an aging priest. In his search, he did not forget a single scripture, a single chant, and the scriptures so said in their fading ink that in the absence of an officiate, any holy man would do, any man who knows the right words and knows in what order they were said and believes them with all his soul and Erwin figures two out of three isn't bad.

But his chest aches now, splits open for her and for this one tangible, breathing connection with another whose ribs strain like his in the moonlight, whose teeth thrum with each ruby gush.

Erwin listens to her last words and invites her to repent, but he asks, too, if she was who the villagers claim her to be, if she perhaps started with animal blood, had stolen butchers' buckets and then trapped robins and rats when they closed for the holidays. He asks if she'd ever seduced another into offering their neck, ever tasted another's love from their open wrists.

“Never,” she says with the monotony of one who's said it again and again and again. “Never,” she says with the indifference of one whose words were taken for lies one too many times. “Never,” she says, and Erwin believes.

Erwin nods to the judge as he leaves the courthouse. Levi turns as chains rattle behind them.

“But she's innocent,” Levi says as she is led with rods and chains into the anticipatory rumble of the waiting crowd. Her matted hair falls over her muzzled mouth as the rope is thrown across her middle and winds and winds and winds. Erwin lays a hand on his shoulder. A warning. A tether.

“It's just one shitty little village,” Levi seethes, and his demand is clear. Take her, he didn't say. Take her like you took me.

“Even so, the king,” Erwin says as the first flames lick at her feet, “has many eyes and ears.”

Levi throws off his hand and stalks back to their horses. Erwin remains. He watches the flames. He hears the screams. The Survey Corps could not afford the scrutiny should he conscript this woman so soon after plucking the Underground's most wanted man out of the waiting hands of the Military Police. If the Survey Corps halted every witch hunt within the walls, they would never leave them.

So he watches her burn alive and mourns the woman she was, and the woman he, for precious moments, had imagined her to be, and he doesn't have to wonder which loss he feels more.

 


End file.
